Tumblr, you and I need to have a talk.
But Stephen, what do we need to talk about? Also, we are Legion.
I’m gonna sideline that last comment, but you might want that looked at.
We need to talk about poetry, or to be more specific, we need to talk about love poems.
I’ve been thinking about love poems because I tend to avoid them when I’m looking through the tags. I don’t mean to offend you if you write love poems, but they just aren’t usually my cup of meat (“but when Quinn the Eskimo gets here everybody’s gonna run to him!”). I think it comes down to a question of context.
The following can be said of all writing, but I notice this problem most when I’m reading through love poems.
I read through these first few lines of a poem, and I ask myself “do I care?” Most of the time the answer is “no”, and I move on. It doesn’t mean it’s a bad poem; it just doesn’t speak to me. But I sometimes wonder if these poems can speak to most people.
Poetry is a weird sort of thing. I think the popular understanding of poetry is either the poetry read by tweed suited professors at universities, or the angst/hormone laden teen scrawlings that a lot of folks indulge in during high school. There’s nothing objectively wrong with either “genre” of poetry, but I think anyone writing poetry does themselves a disservice by trying to shoe-horn into either category.
This isn’t a problem I’m making up. You’ve got certain poets angrily ranting that the TWC sucks up individual voices and spits out easily digestible boring-as-fuck goo under the guise of poetry. You’ve got other Tumblr poets understandably angry that these are the sorts of poems and poets that get continually reblogged and featured.
Hell, my only featured poem’s primary demographic is teens 16-17 who, while I appreciate their support of my work, probably don’t have the same context for the sentiment that drove me to write it that they will given even a few more years working through this whole romance game.
So, I can agree that maybe it feels like Tumblr is homogenizing the sound of its poetry scene, and that if you want you shit to get noticed you have to start shilling things out to certain formulaic standards. But it doesn’t have to be like that. While not everyone gets the same amount of attention, there’s a seething “underbelly” of Tumblr poetry that is varied and interesting. It’s kind of like the real world that way. Sure, the poems that get anthologized are all the same easily commoditized bullshit, but you can’t blame the publishers for that. Why put together an anthology if it’s not going to make money? And isn’t easy money easier than risky money? But if you take that same twenty/thirty dollars and go see a live poetry slam (plus a beer and a tip), chances are you’ll be introduced to some very different sounding voices.
So what the hell does this have to do with love poems?
Quite a bit, actually. I’m just plain bored of them. The fact of the matter is that most love poems ever written tread the same ground over and over again. This doesn’t mean your poem is bad. If its intended audience is the person it’s about, it’s probably one hell of a poem, but the rest of the wide world doesn’t have that same context of specificity. We completely understand that you’ve got heightened emotions and hormones coursing through you, but that doesn’t mean we do.
There’s that old adage that “there’s nothing new under the sun”. While that may be true for the core parts of human existence, emotions and the like, let’s just go ahead and call bullshit on that right now for the expression of those things. It may be the same story you’ve heard a hundred times, but that doesn’t mean you can’t tell it your way.
These are the two things that I want in a love poem: One if you want an absolute stranger to read and appreciate your love for this person/object/animal/whatever, you might try to instill that love in them somehow, instead of just leaping to the emotional climax. Two if you want to write a love poem, don’t give a fuck about how all the rest of the love poems are being written. It’s your love, express it however the hell you want, not how it “should” be.
Here’s the deal: you’re writing poetry, not essays for school. There are no concrete forms (not even concrete poetry). There’s no perfect platonic ideal. There are no rules for you to break. It’s poetry. Literally the only requirement is that you put something on the page, and that something doesn’t even have to be real words. Take that freedom and do something with it.
Like it or not, the poetry tag is way down in the rankings because the vast community of people don’t really understand the breadth of poetry being written. Yeah, our poetry features maybe don’t reflect everyone’s taste. But the only way to fix either of those problems is to stake your ground and write yourself into a foxhole.
So go write some damn love poems.
-Stephen
